d the letter before the eyes of the dying man "Do you know
what this is?"

"My letter."

"Do you insist on my posting it?"

He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the answer:
"Yes!"

Mr. Neal moved to the door, with the letter in his hand. The German
followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a longer delay,
met the Scotchman's inexorable eye, and drew back again in silence.
The door closed and parted them, without a word having passed on either
side.

The doctor went back to the bed and whispered to the sinking man: "Let
me call him back; there is time to stop him yet!" It was useless. No
answer came; nothing showed that he heeded, or even heard. His eyes
wandered from the child, rested for a moment on his own struggling hand,
and looked up entreatingly in the compassionate face that bent over him.
The doctor lifted the hand, paused, followed the father's longing eyes
back to the child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand
gently toward the boy's head. The hand touched it, and trembled
violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm, and
spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned from pale
to red, from red to purple, from purple to pale again. Then the toiling
hands lay still, and the shifting color changed no more.

The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it from
the death chamber, with the child in his arms. He looked out as he
passed by, and saw Mr. Neal in the street below, slowly returning to the
inn.

"Where is the letter?" he asked.

Three words sufficed for the Scotchman's answer.

"In the post."

THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.

THE STORY.

BOOK THE FIRST.

I. THE MYSTERY OF OZIAS MIDWINTER.

ON a warm May night, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
the Reverend Decimus Brock--at that time a visitor to the Isle of
Man--retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious personal
responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no distinct idea of the
means by which he might relieve himself from the pressure of his present
circumstances.

The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life at which a
sensible man learns to decline (as often as his temper will let him) all
useless conflict with the tyranny of his own troubles. Abandoning any
further effort to reach a decision in the emergency that now beset him,
Mr. Brock sat down placidly in his shirt sleeves on the